Long Live AI

Reports of the death of artificial intelligence were greatly exaggerated. Get ready for nanobots in the body that root out disease and keep us young.

A couple of decades before the boom-bust cycle in e-commerce and telecommunications there was a similar phenomenon in artificial intelligence. Many people think the so-called AI winter in the 1980s, when many AI companies folded, was the end of the story. But boom-bust cycles are sometimes harbingers of true revolutions (recall the railroad frenzy of the 19th century), and we see the same phenomenon in AI.

Artificial intelligence permeates our economy. It's what I define as "narrow" AI: machine intelligence that equals or exceeds human intelligence for specific tasks. Every time you send an e-mail or make a cell phone call, intelligent algorithms route the information. AI programs diagnose heart disease, fly and land airplanes, guide autonomous weapons, make automated investment decisions for a trillion dollars' worth of funds and guide industrial processes. These were all research projects a couple of decades ago. If all the intelligent software in the world were to suddenly stop functioning, modern civilization would grind to a halt.

So what are the prospects for "strong" AI, which I describe as machine intelligence with the full range of human intelligence? We can meet the hardware requirements. I figure we need about 10 quadrillion calculations a second to provide a functional equivalent to all the regions of the brain. IBM's Blue Gene/L computer is already at 100 trillion. If we plug in the semiconductor industry's projections, we can see that 10 quadrillion calculations a second will be available for $1,000 by around 2020.

So now the controversy is focused on the algorithms. To understand the principles of human intelligence we need to reverse-engineer the human brain. Here progress is far greater than most people realize. The spatial and temporal resolution of brain scanning is progressing at an exponential rate, roughly doubling each year. Scanning tools can see individual interneuronal connections and watch them fire in real time. We already have mathematical models and simulations of a few dozen regions of the brain, including the cerebellum, which comprises more than half the neurons. It is reasonable to conclude that in two decades we will have effective models for most of the brain.

Machines can now far exceed human capabilities at such tasks as logical analysis and searching through vast databases. A couple of minutes spent with Google demonstrates that superiority. The strength of human intelligence lies in our ability to recognize patterns. But machines are gradually gaining in this type of ability as well.

Our technology is also shrinking at an exponential rate. By the 2020s nanotechnology will let us build vast numbers of tiny machines at the molecular level. The killer app of strong AI, combined with nanotechnology, will be blood-cell-size robots called nanobots. We'll have billions of them traveling in our bloodstream, communicating with one another on a wireless local area network and transmitting information and software to and from the Internet. They'll keep us healthy by destroying pathogens and cancer cells, removing debris, correcting DNA errors and otherwise reversing disease and aging processes.

They'll also go inside our brain capillaries and interact with our biological neurons. By augmenting and/or replacing the signals from our real senses, they'll provide full-immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system. "Experience beamers" will send their entire flow of sensory and emotional experiences onto the Internet the way people now beam images from their Web cams. We'll be able to plug in and experience what it's like to be someone else.

The result will be a profound transformation of business, commerce and society. We'll come up with solutions to improve our health, clean up the environment and provide for an expanding human population. Keep in mind that this is not an alien invasion of intelligent machines coming to compete with us. It is already in our pockets, will soon migrate into our clothing and will make its way into our bodies and brains.